Steven Universe
“Change Your Mind”, Season 5 Episode 28
Requested By
bwoop bwoop on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s an American animated series that is popular among several of my friends. I get the impression it’s about an overweight boy accidentally plonked down into a Magical Girl-style anime series. There’s something about gemstones.
Recap
The opening credits immediately confirm most of what I knew: this is a Magical Girl anime, and the heroes are the four famous gemstones: Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, and Steven.
The episode begins with Steven waking up in prison wearing his magical girl outfit. The warden enters, and (with a strong disappointed-mother vibe) accuses Steven and “Connie” of making a scene and dancing. Steven, realizing Connie isn’t in the cell with him anymore, demands to know what the warden did with her. The warden-mother says Steven is the one who wanted to “keep organics from the Kyanite colony”. These appear to be some kind of pe(s)ts that Steven accidentally released in the palace.
The warden, who turns out to be enormous – easily dozens of times Steven’s size – calls Steven “Pink” and tells him that “White is very unhappy” with him. Shadowy figures appear and Steven rapidly shapeshifts multiple times until he wakes up.
I’m guessing White is the leader of the gemstones, and each gemstone has a nickname representing its own color, with Steven getting the pink one.
When Steven wakes up, he’s in the same cell. He verifies that his gem is still embedded in his abdomen, and that Connie is in fact still in the prison next to him.
The warden, whose skin is blue and therefore is also named Blue, enters the cell in exactly the same way as she did in the dream. This time, however, Steven is accused of “fusing” with Connie1. I don’t entirely follow this conversation, but whatever they did wrong, Blue is holding Steven’s friends (Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl) captive elsewhere.
Then something weird happens: Steven begins sobbing. Connie tries to comfort him, but he doesn’t feel sad. So why is he crying all of a sudden? Aha: “How many times did you lock her in here and make her cry?” he asks Blue. So I think I understand now: the gemstones are alien beings that merge with their hosts. Steven’s not crying; it’s the pink gemstone personality inside him that’s crying, from the trauma of previous experiences in this room.
Blue at first denies it, but realizes she has been treating Pink wrong. She decides to release Steven and his friends to make Pink happy, and takes them to where the other gemstones are being held. But lying in wait there is Yellow (I haven’t been given her name yet but I can put two and two together). Blue and Yellow argue…
…and then fight. Steven and Connie use the distraction to grab the gems, and eventually the fight pops the bubble in which they are trapped, but they still don’t come out. Yellow defeats Blue handily and has her at her mercy. To persuade her, Blue admits that she’s been suffering in silence for ages, just like Pink did, and just like you are, Yellow!
Yellow says that some suffering for the cause of a perfect empire is justified. Steven points out that this isn’t a perfect empire: just look at all the destruction!
Yellow is convinced, and allows Steven and Connie to take the gems and Blue to stand up. The two of them escort Steven and Connie to “their legs” – which turn out to be an enormous pair of crystallized pink legs attached to a white crystallized torso. “We’ll have time to heal the corrupted gems!” says Connie2. But just as they approach the legs, White rises from the ground and blocks their way.
She demands they all, including Blue and Yellow, go to their rooms. Argument ensues, during which Steven tries and fails to wake the gemstones up. But before White can enforce her demand, a pair of crystallized arms – one blue, one yellow - come flying in from space and start beating up on the white-torso-with-pink-legs. Surely it’s Yellow and Blue doing it? Nope: it’s other friends of Steven, named Bismuth, Lapis Lazuli, and Peridot, who found these arms all broken and fixed them up.
The white torso recovers, and announces that “White Diamond” is disappointed in them all, and mentions other color/gem pairings: Pink Diamond and Rose Quartz. Where did these come from, and why do the captions call the speaker “White Pearl”? Maybe the relationship between color and gemstone is more complicated than I thought…
Anyway, Blue and Yellow tell Steven to run - but he wants to stay and fix the gemstone family. They connect the blue and yellow arms to the white torso, and Steven uses his control over the pink legs to force the white torso to kneel; with no motor control over its limbs, it has no choice but to stand there and listen3. Yellow talks about being forced to conquer worlds, and Blue about enforcing rules, and how they need to relax.
White’s response, however, isn’t ideal: she zaps Blue and Yellow with her laser eyes – something she could have done at any point - and they turn monochrome. Steven and the others flee, but Steven accidentally drops his four gem friends down a bottomless pit (Why are there four of them? Aren’t there only three others in the opening credits?). In desperation, he jumps down the pit after them.
As he falls, he reaches the closest gem4, Amethyst. He grabs it and they “fuse” into one body, which pulls Amethyst out of her gemstone state. They then separate, and Amethyst throws Steven at one of the other gems, from which he extracts Pearl in the same way. Pearl uses her magic umbrella to make everyone float down safely.
Finally, Steven turns to Garnet, who is in for some reason two gemstones at once. He begs her to come out, and just as they merge: STOMP, White Pearl’s pink shoe crushes them all.
Ah, but the merged Steven and Garnet is so strong that it can hold off the shoe just before they all turn into a fine mist. Calling itself Sunstone, it’s clearly the most powerful of them. So let’s climb up the robot, reach the head, and stop White Pearl! They start climbing, but get swatted away easily.
So we need to be even stronger. How do we do that? Fuse all of us together, forming Obsidian5, creating an enormous Lovecraftian nightmare arachnid. And they climb up the legs again, while Peridot, Bismuth, Lapis Lazuli, and Connie serve as a distraction. White Pearl repeatedly swats them away, using slow, lumbering arm movements.
Obsidian pulls an enormous fiery sword out of its throat and slices off White Pearl’s blue and yellow hands at the wrist, then leaps up and grabs her in the face.
White Pearl smashes her own face into a building to crush the spider, which separates it into its four component heroes, hanging onto her cheek. But that’s close enough; they climb in through the eye socket to find White Diamond inside.
Wait, wasn’t she called White Pearl a moment ago? What’s going on here?
White Diamond, who does not look like she did earlier has the monochrome Blue and Yellow with her, and she gives them a lecture on their behavior, speaking through their mouths as well as her own. Then she brings out White Pearl – aha, so these are two different people6 - and does the same with her.
During the lecture White Diamond admits that Pink is a part of her, the ramifications of which none of the good guys (nor myself) understand. And White Diamond doesn’t giving them time to try: she zaps Amethyst, Garnet, and Pearl, one by one, disabling their gems and turning them into monochrome puppets too. Controlling their bodies, she has them thank her for removing their flaws.
Connie arrives through the eyehole, but the puppetted Pearl quickly disarms her.
Now White Diamond turns her attention to Pink. But she doesn’t address Pink as though the latter is misguided and thinks she’s Steven; she addresses Pink as though she is Steven’s mother, saying that Pink pretended to be “Rose Quartz”. Steven objects: I’m not my mother!
I thought I understood who Pink was and how this worked, but now I’m more confused than before.
“It’s time to come out, Pink,” White Diamond says. She grasps Steven’s gem, embedded in his stomach, and pulls it out.
Steven collapses. But the pink gem takes the form of a ghostly Pink Steven, and we see through both Stevens’ eyes at once. “Where is Pink?” demands White Diamond. “She’s gone!” shouts Pink Steven. The two Stevens approach each other (regular Steven can’t move, but Connie carries him), and White Diamond tries to stop them. She zaps Pink Steven, once, twice, and then through all of her puppets at a time. But Pink Steven puts up a shield that resists all of the blasts. The two Stevens embrace and reunite.
White Diamond pounds the ground and insists that this can’t be true. “Why are you acting like a child?” she demands petulantly.
“I am a child,” says Steven. “What’s your excuse?” And suddenly a pink glow appears, and White loses control of everyone.
That’s when the other gems arrive, too late to help with anything.
White Diamond doesn’t understand: what is this pink glow on my face? Why am I not perfectly white? I have to be perfect! If I’m not perfect, who am I? Who are you? Who is anybody?
Cut to a concert on a beach. At the end of the song, right on queue, White Diamond with pink legs and blue and yellow arms lands there, Steven and friends in her arms. Steven is reunited with his father, who is attending the concert.
Then a spaceship arrives, whose crew is made up of “the off-colors”: Lars, Padparacha(sp?), and some other people. They freak out when they see White Diamond, as they had been fleeing the “Diamond Authority”, but Steven reassures them: Colors, meet off-colors. Off-colors, meet-colors.
Steven sings the theme song over a montage of the gemstones bringing Blue, Yellow, and White to various planets they’ve visited across the series. The three look uncomfortable as they are introduced to all these imperfect creatures. But eventually the White Torso flies off, leaving the pink robot legs with Steven. He sings one last song to the other gemstones.
The closing credits consist, for some reason, of the word “You” sung over and over again.
Unresolved questions
What will White Diamond do with the worlds they’ve already conquered and assimilated? What relationship will she have with Steven?
How was Pink Steven able to withstand the most powerful eyebeams that White Diamond was able to throw at him?
What is actually happening in the link between Pink and Steven? Is Pink really his mother, or has she become Steven or merged with Steven in some way? Or something else entirely?
Whatever happened to those Kyanite worm creatures Steven and his friends released? Or was that only part of the dream?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 6/10. Slightly above average for the genre. The story of the empire that wants to make the world perfect through uniformity is a classic one, and merging it with the very personal plotline of Pink/Steven was expertly done.
But it’s not without flaws and plot holes. In particular, the special abilities and their relative strengths were inconsistent: Steven was able to control the pink legs from outside them, to force the white torso to listen to him, but this power was very quickly forgotten in the underground fight when it would have come in useful; the white torso was extremely agile and nimble until the climbing scene, when its attacks suddenly became slow and lumbering and cumbersome for no apparent reason; Pink Steven was able to withstand White Diamond’s strongest attack, with no explanation, even though none of the other characters could withstand White Diamond’s weakest.
In short, the why of the plot was excellent, but the story could have done with a bit more attention to the how.
Writing: 5/10. By rights this should be higher; the dialogue was for the most part above average, and the merging of the personal plotline with the imperial plotline is just as much a success of the writing as it is of the plotting.
But the episode lacked subtlety. The discussions of parental discipline were spelled out multiple times in detail; I know the show is intended for kids, but are capable of learning from example without need for the lecture (at one point they break the fourth wall to give viewers a lesson about bullying, which wasn’t even the subject of the episode!). Similarly, the metaphor for transgenderism was far too on-the-nose - and, when it came to the subject of “fusing”, carried some very unfortunate implications.
Production: 4/10. The music was uninspired. The animation style was excellent, but it was let down by inattention to scale. The difference in size between the White Torso robot and a human being seemed exactly the difference in size between the White Torso robot and Obsidian, which was also exactly the difference in size between Obsidian and Connie.
It’s a shame about the animation and music, because the voice acting was very good.
Characterization: 8/10. While I can’t pretend to understand any of the subtleties surrounding who Steven and Pink are and what exactly their relationship is, there was a lot of complexity visible beneath the surface. I also liked Blue, Yellow, and White Diamond – though I suspect those characters are minor characters that were only present in the series’s final arc, and hadn’t been around in previous seasons. I had no time to get to know anybody else.
Accessibility: 6/10. Very difficult to grade. On the one hand, the straightforward metaphor of accepting Pink for wanting to be Steven was made very – nay, overly – easy to understand. The unique character designs made them very easy to tell apart and learn their names. But I’m left with a lot of questions about the factions. What are the gemstones? What are the colors? Is every color a gemstone? Why are some gemstones not colors? Why do two gemstones have the same color? What exactly happens when a gemstone and a human merge, and what does this have to do with Steven’s mother?
As I periodically need to emphasize, this isn’t a criticism of the episode. These things were probably explained in depth going back to the premiere. It’s not the finale’s job or fault that I didn’t watch the rest.
Closure: 6/10. This feels like the closure of an important story arc; less so of an entire series. While this is probably one of Steven’s greatest personal victories, it’s just one chapter in his overall career as a superhero.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s not bad – but it’s very much not for me.
If, as I will shortly discover, the whole Pink vs. Steven thing is a metaphor for transgenderism, what is the prohibition on fusing a metaphor for? Steven and Connie are definitely too young for what I fear it is.
Either this was never followed up on, or I completely misunderstood it.
Let’s just hope none of them tell White to “bite me”.
This is not how gravity works.
This is not how obsidian is formed, as far as I know.
But when and how did White Diamond show up? Where was she during the battle on the surface?